Some­thing very bad hap­pened to Agnes. It’s hint­ed at in the first seg­ment of Sor­ry, Baby, when her best friend Lydie (Nao­mi Ack­ie) arrives for a vis­it, and asks Agnes (Eva Vic­tor) if she feels com­fort­able hav­ing the office of their old Eng­lish pro­fes­sor Pre­ston Deck­er (Louis Can­cel­mi). It’s fair­ly easy to infer what Lydie means by this, par­tic­u­lar­ly once they go for din­ner at the home of their for­mer class­mate Natasha (Kel­ly McCor­ma­ck) and she snark­i­ly remarks that Agnes was always ​“Decker’s favourite”. Lydie polite­ly changes the sub­ject and gives Agnes’s leg a reas­sur­ing squeeze.

There has been a del­uge of films about sex­u­al assault in the wake of MeToo, but for all the artis­tic cap­i­tal (right­ful­ly) afford­ed to sur­vivors, pre­cious lit­tle has mate­ri­al­ly changed with­in cul­ture. Some­times it feels as if there’s more resent­ment than ever towards vic­tims for dar­ing speak­ing up – it’s this real­i­ty that Eva Victor’s direc­to­r­i­al debut (which she wrote and stars in) cap­tures so well, in which a woman is sex­u­al­ly assault­ed by a man in a posi­tion of trust, and the accord­ing fall-out is the lack of fall-out. Noth­ing in the world at large changes; every­thing does in hers, revealed in non-chrono­log­i­cal order, with a chap­ter for each year fol­low­ing the assault. When she goes to see a (male) doc­tor fol­low­ing her assault, he chas­tis­es her for not going to the ER imme­di­ate­ly after­wards. He seems com­plete­ly indif­fer­ent to the trau­mat­ic inci­dent Agnes has expe­ri­enced; all Agnes and Lydie can do in response is laugh.

What else can Agnes do? The per­pe­tra­tor has already hand­ed in his notice at col­lege, and the school claim they’re unable to open a case against him as a result. Agnes doesn’t want to press charges against him because he has a child – and if she’s treat­ed like an incon­ve­nience by med­ical staff and her school, who’s to say the police would be any dif­fer­ent? So Agnes inter­nalis­es her pain. Over the course of the next four years, she lives her life in the same apart­ment she shared with Lydie dur­ing grad school, and teach­es at the same col­lege she used to attend. There’s an unspo­ken sense that Agnes can’t quite move on from the place; she sleep­i­ly haunts it, unable to find clo­sure because no one – except Lydie – under­stands or acknowl­edges what hap­pened to her.

It’s the banal­i­ty of endur­ing a sex­u­al assault that Vic­tor cap­tures so well in her film; how the trau­ma lingers long in the body, even when you keep insist­ing to every­one (includ­ing your­self) that you’re fine. When Agnes begins a ten­ta­tive romance with her sweet neigh­bour Gavin (Lucas Hedges) she doesn’t quite know how to respond to his affec­tion; when she has a pan­ic attack in her car, a gruff sand­wich shop own­er (John Car­roll Lynch) coach­es her through it and then makes her some food. These small moments of kind­ness – as well as the beau­ti­ful friend­ship between Agnes and Lydie – glim­mer like flecks of gold on the bot­tom of a murky riverbed, demon­strat­ing there is still some good in the world despite what hap­pened to her. Good that also exists in Agnes’ cat Olga, who she finds on the street as a kit­ten days after her assault, even if she even­tu­al­ly has to euthanise a mouse left in her bed.

This sur­pris­ing­ly vio­lent mer­cy killing feels like an odd­ly cathar­tic moment for Agnes, who is sym­bol­ic of thou­sands of peo­ple who nev­er receive jus­tice after being assault­ed, and reflects the strange rhythms of Sor­ry, Baby – a film which doesn’t pre­tend to have all the answers, but cer­tain­ly under­stands the bur­den of shame placed on sex­u­al assault sur­vivors, and how nav­i­gat­ing the world in the after­math of assault feels like walk­ing through dense fog, blind­ing reach­ing for a hand to guide you to the oth­er side.

For all its big themes, there is a vague­ness to Haf­sia Herzi’s anec­do­tal char­ac­ter study about a 17-year-old named Fati­ma (Nadia Mel­li­ti in her first screen role). Adapt­ed from Fati­ma Daas’s aut­ofic­tion nov­el ​‘The Last One’, pub­lished in 2020, there is much to admire in the ten­der­ness that sat­u­rates depic­tions of the nude female form and in the eupho­ria puls­ing through a hand­ful of les­bian club scenes.

It’s hard to shake the feel­ing else­where that spe­cif­ic char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion has been sac­ri­ficed in order to duti­ful­ly ser­vice the iden­ti­ty mark­ers of Fatima’s life. She is defined through the prism of being a queer Mus­lim nav­i­gat­ing the tran­si­tion between home with her Alger­ian par­ents and adult­hood accord­ing to her own val­ues in Paris. There is a lit­tle sense of how Fati­ma exists as a per­son unplugged from these head­line tus­sles. We are told that she is a keen foot­baller, but it’s only in the final scene that we wit­ness these skills. This is a char­ac­ter study about a char­ac­ter that remains out of view.

Divid­ed into sea­son­al sub­head­ings – Spring, Sum­mer, Autumn and Win­ter – Herzi intro­duces Fati­ma in bois­ter­ous scenes with sis­ters at home. At school male friends talk loud­ly and graph­i­cal­ly about (imag­i­nary?) sex­u­al encoun­ters. When a qui­et scene final­ly comes its con­se­quences are loud­er still. She sneaks a meet­ing with her some­times boyfriend who negs her for not dress­ing more fem­i­nine­ly before sug­gest­ing mar­riage. The spec­tre of tra­di­tion­al patri­ar­chal gen­der roles looms. Per­haps this is why Fati­ma is primed to fly at a gay class­mate who cor­rect­ly notices that she is of his tribe.

All the thanks he receives is a bro­ken pair of glass­es, nonethe­less, his obser­va­tion push­es Fati­ma into explor­ing the women-only sec­tion of dat­ing apps. She gives a fake name and a fake nation­al­i­ty as she hoovers up expe­ri­ences until a real life encounter with Ji-Na (Park Ji-Min, iri­des­cent) opens her up to first love.

Mel­lit works over­time to emote some­thing between the lines of a char­ac­ter required to be impas­sive and con­tained in most sit­u­a­tions. Scenes of inti­ma­cy, danc­ing and a dream where she grinds to a halt at a swim­ming pool reveal a poten­tial oth­er­wise sub­li­mat­ed by a script over­ly pre­oc­cu­pied with mov­ing us from A to B. There is a, per­haps appre­cia­ble, lack of trust in the audi­ence to under­stand the cul­tur­al forces at play. Hence there are scenes unpack­ing every­thing from homo­pho­bia with­in tra­di­tion­al Islam to a list of what les­bians do for sex­u­al gratification

The cost of the film’s need to spell out the con­flict­ing ele­ments of Fatima’s life is that she is not afford­ed the same gor­geous vital­i­ty that ani­mates Ji-Na and a les­bian cou­ple she meets in anoth­er sea­son. This is a frus­trat­ing film that ticks all the box­es that make up a per­son with­out pump­ing in the oxy­gen that would make them come alive.

Herzi con­vinces that the out les­bian life is a rich one and that Algerian/​French/​Muslim cul­ture is full of tex­ture and nuance. The back­drops in La Petite Dernière are care­ful­ly wrought, it’s only the teenag­er her­self who is crushed by the bur­den of all that she represents.

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